I suppose this is the best that Star Wars prequel-haters can hope for come September 16th — Episodes #4 through #6 for $39 and change through Amazon Prime. I’ll just throw Return of the Jedi into the dumpster. As God is my witness I’ll never watch that film again.

A guy I know and trust who’s seen David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method is calling it “great, brilliant, precise and lucid,” and that “among all Cronenberg’s films the one it’s closest to is Dead Ringers.”

Oh, and the Ben-Hur restoration that will show at the New York Film festival prior to hitting Bluray “is tremendous,” he says, “so brilliantly clear and sensitively done…the best I’ve ever seen it [look]. And Miklos Rosza‘s score should be heard to maximum effect.”

The Obama campaign is sending out free bumper stickers to the faithful. The maniacal Rick Perry is probably going to win the 2012 Republican nomination for President, and because he’s such a neanderthal-sounding, corporate kowtowing yokel (i.e., the new Greg Stillson), Barack Obama, despite his plummeting poll numbers right now, will eke out a victory…barely. Once Average Joes get a really good look at Perry, a slim majority will suck it in, shake their heads, exhale, hold their nose and vote for Obama. 50.3%…something like that. Maybe 51%.

With only six weeks to go before the 10.7 British 1release, Tyrannosaur director Paddy Considine — “the Terrence Malick of trailer cutting” — has finally delivered a trailer. It lasts 1:52, and conveys the tenderness and the rage with some nice, counter-balancing music. But it under-sells, I feel, the shattering performance by Olivia Colman as a battered wife. I’m serious. Colman and Olivia Spencer and (although I haven’t seen Coriolanus) Vanessa Redgrave — the Best Supporting Actress roster will have to include these three.

“Colman’s performance comes as a revelation,” wrote the Village Voice‘s Nicholas Rapold. Colman “went on a total transformation on this film…she became world-class,” Considine said in Rapold’s piece. Everlasting shame upon each and every SAG member that fails to see Tyrannosaur, at the very least for Colman’s sake.

Most dreams happen during REM sleep, right? Sometime around 4 or 5 am? The ones you tend to remember and write about the next day are the ones that wake you up at this, the hour of the wolf. Within the last two weeks I’ve had two…I might as well call them nightmares. But they were’t nightmares as much as disturbing short films with hateful predatory characters coming in for the kill, and both were about bad stuff that I’ve done coming back to bite me in the ass. Both were so unpleasant that I had to get up and shower and start working in order to flush them out of my head.

The first was a Telluride dream starring a youngish Robert Redford (i.e., how he looked around the time of Electric Horseman), a younger Roger Ebert (talking, heavier, eating and drinking) and, for some inexplicable reason, Richard Attenborough as he looked in the ’60s. Someone had thrown together a Redford career-tribute reel, and yet it wasn’t clips but new surreal footage in which his Hubbell Gardner from The Way We Were had a brief conversation with Jeremiah Johnson, and Bill McKay of The Candidate gave a smile and a pat on the back to Turner from Three Days of the Condor. And then the Horse Whisperer guy stepped in and nodded and waved to the other guys, and so it went. All together and hugging like the people on the beach at the end of The Tree of Life, everyone relaxed and alpha in a kind of Octopussy’s Garden-type way.

And the real Redford was sitting there in this mountain-air, Rocky Mountain environment, watching the tribute with the rest of us. Ebert was sitting at a kind of picnic table with at least two pretty women, and Attenborough was sitting across from Ebert and joking and giggling the whole time, and the vibe was very smooth and soothing — everyone in this Shangrila-like place, far from the madding crowd, etc. And I was saying to myself stuff like “this is awfully nice” and “I’m pretty happy here.”

And then I started to hear from people who were pointing accusatory fingers about stuff that I’d done in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s but had long since forgotten about — things that I had to answer for. People I’d treated inconsiderately, deadlines I hadn’t met, bills I hadn’t paid, things I’d lost through selfishness or carelessness. No felonious crimes, mind, but they sounded pretty bad when you added them all up. I was guilty and had to pay. It took me about 10 or 15 minutes after I woke up to either re-suppress these demons or come to the gradual realization that I hadn’t really been such a bad guy in the past.

Two and half hours ago I woke up from nightmare #2, which was about about working in some kind of corporate environment in a typical bullshit glass-and-steel building — i.e., the kind of place that was gloriously blown up at the end of Fight Club. And it was basically about my not being very popular with younger co-workers and being accused of not doing stuff that I’d been asked to do and having alcohol on my breath (and in actuality I never touch the stuff, even wine, until the work is entirely done and it’s 9 pm or later) and being plotted against and ganged up on, and eventually being canned. One of the guys who was bitching and against me looked an awful lot like Jeff Sneider (i.e., “TheInsneider”). It was an atmosphere of pure ugliness, pure venality.

The dream reminded me that in most urban business-y work environments, about 40% of everyone’s time and energy goes into gossip and back-biting and the forming of cabals and occasional feverish plottings against this or that person (“Let’s get that guy!), and that maybe 35% goes into creative solution-finding or problem-solving or honest hard work and real-deal accomplishment, and that the other 25% is about lunch and coffee breaks and goofing off. Hell is other people. Hell is living with the daily fear of being fired. Hell is friendly-but-chilly guys like Jack Kelly, who was my bureau chief at People. I’ve been a stressed but relatively happy soul since I began working on my own as a columnist in 1994 (for the L.A. Times Syndicate) and particularly as an online guy, beginning in ’98.

Everyone understands there are two Undefeated films out there, right? One is a piece of hagiography about Sarah Palin that you can throw in the dumpster (it’s only made a lousy $100,000 since opening in mid-July), and the other is really, really good. I’ve just seen the latter, a deeply touching 90-minute doc about Memphis’s Manassas Tigers, an African-American high-school football team trying to up their wins. But it’s mainly about various team members toughing it out with personal struggles. And it really sinks in.

The Undefeated gang at Austin’s SXSW film festival in mid March 2011.

The first half of Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin‘s film is somewhere between good enough and not bad — very nicely shot & smoothly cut but still a familiar portrait of a rural underdog football team. Seen it before. But the second half…whoa. That’s when all the threads pay off and the seeds sprout, and it really gets you. I started to choke up a bit during one scene, but I coughed and kept it in check. “Shit…this is affecting,” I said to myself.

The life of the party is Bill Courtney, a dogged, red-haired lumber mill owner who donates his time as coach of the Tigers. He’s really quite an educator and an orator and an inspirational father to his players. He really gets into their lives and gets them to deal with their temporary setbacks, foibles, challenges.

The main “characters” are “Money” Brown, a right tackle who suffers a torn ligament halfway through his senior season. An angry junior named Chavis Daniels who did time in a youth jail during his sophomore year. And O.C. Brown, a 280-pounder (he reminds you of the kid in The Blind Side) who has the best shot at a college football scholarship but who has problems getting decent grades.

It’s basically a slice of a real-life Blind Side (as far as O.C. is concerned) mixed in with Peter Berg‘s Friday Night Lights but without the wackjob parents.

It even ends on a similar note to Berg’s film. It isn’t the winning or the losing, but how you play the game and whether or not you’ve given your all and stood tall in a proud way, etc. The doc isn’t really about football as much as character, intestinal fortitude, manning up, etc. And caring, really caring. Put a little love in your heart.

I missed this morning’s screening of Ralph Fiennes‘ Coriolanus, but at the 1 pm Undefeated screening two seasoned critics raved about Vanessa Redgrave‘s performance as Volumnia, the mother of Fiennes’ titular character. Add Guy Lodge’s Berlin Film Festival rave and there doesn’t seem to be much doubt about Redgrave being a top contender for a Best Supporting Actress nomination.

My Week With Marilyn (Weinstein Co., 11.4) “belongs to Michelle Williams and she alone. That is all anyone will be talking about once people actually see the movie. There is absolutely, positively no doubt that Williams is right alongside Meryl Streep and Glenn Close at the very front of the Best Actress race.” — quote from smart, well-connected guy who’s seen it, quoted on 8.15.

Set in 1914 or thereabouts, David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method (Sony Classics, 11.23) is about a kind of perverse relationship between the young Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), his mentor Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), and Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a lady with “issues,” as we would say today. But if I didn’t know the background and was just strolling around a theatre lobby in an orange T-shirt and cutoffs with a pot belly and big tub of popcorn, I’d be presuming that Knightley is playing a ghost of some kind…right?

This “Funny or Die” video about Dave (brother of James) Franco effing himself is…what, mildly amusing? Less so? it’s also a little “enough already” given the cavalcade of gay-themed roles and films that James has made over the last couple of years (playing Scott Smith in Milk, Allen Ginsberg in Howl and Hart Crane in The Broken Tower plus having directed that Sal Mineo movie).

The Franco brothers aren’t exactly Olsen and Johnson or Laurel and Hardy, but they’ve made videos together and are known as having started in the same genetic dugout, and between the two of them there’s been a little too much man-meat. For the next four or five years they really need to give homosexual congress a rest. Make it nine or ten years. It’s jgetting too one-note….gay this, gay that, gay whatever.

Four highly cool New York Film Festival extras were announced this morning. The coolest, for me, will be a screening of the first three episodes of Oliver Stone‘s The Untold History of the United States, the forthcoming Showtime series. They segments will focus “on the events leading up to America’s entrance into World War II, the war itself, and the unjustly forgotten figure of former U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace,” says the release.

The Untold screening will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Stone, co-writer Peter Kuznick, historian Douglas Brinkley and The Nation‘s Jonathan Schell.

The second coolest will be a panel discussion of Pauline Kael by way of two books about the celebrated film critic — Brian Kellow‘s “Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark” and “The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael“. Panelists will include director James Toback (whose Fingers will screen after the discussion), New York critic David Edelstein, Kellow, Geoffrey O’Brien and University fo the Arts professor Camille Paglia.

The third-coolest, I suspect, will be Tahrir, a doc about the Egyptian uprising by Stefano Savona. (I wonder if the doc will be so caught up the thrill of revolution that it’ll choose to ignore the sexual mauling of CBS journalist Lara Logan, an incident that left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, or get into it or what.)

And the fourth-coolest will be Jeffrey Schwartz‘s Vito, a doc about groundbreaking film critic and gay activist Vito Russo (The Celluloid Closet).

Every year I say the same thing about the possible influence of MCN’s Gurus of Gold chart, and I might as well say it again with awards season about to kick off the weekend after next and with the first testing-the-waters Gurus of Gold chart having gone up yesterday.

Every year I ask what could be more worthless or contemptible in the eyes of any fim lover with the slightest trickle of blood in his or her veins than a group of online journos saying, “What we might personally think or feel about the year’s finest films is not our charge. We are here to read and evaluate the feelings and judgments of that crowd of people standing around in that other room….see them? Those older, nice-looking, well-dressed ones standing around and sipping wine and munching on tomato-and mozzarella bruschetta? Watching them is what we do. We sniff around, sense the mood, follow their lead, and totally pivot on their every word or derisive snort or burst of applause at Academy screenings.”

If I could clap my hands three times and banish the concept of Gurus of Gold from the minds of my online colleagues and competitors, I would clap my hands three times. For it is the task of Movie Catholics (which includes all monks and priests and followers of the faith) to stand up and lead at all costs. And it is bad personal karma to put aside what every fibre of your being tells you is the “right” thing to do in order to proclaim (and therefore help to semi-validate and cast a favorable light upon) the occasionally questionable sentiments and allegiances of others.

And I mean especially if these temperature-gauging, tea-leaf readings contribute to a snowball mentality or growing assumption that a certain Best Picture contender has the heat. There is no question in my mind that to some extent the Gurus of Gold (and especially the purely analytical temperature-takers like EW‘s Dave Karger) contributed to last year’s Best Picture win by The King’s Speech by advancing the notion each and every week that it would probably take it. And that, if you don’t mind me saying so, is a terrible thing to live with.

How would you feel if you were 92 years old, let’s say, and on your death bed and looking back upon your professional Hollywood life and saying to yourself, “In my own small but possibly significant way, I probably helped to create a perception of groundswell momentum and inevitability that led to the Best Picture triumphs of The Greatest Show on Earth, Around The World in Eighty Days and Driving Miss Daisy“? How would you feel about that? Good?

True Catholics are players on the field, not watchers from the stands. They need to convey their own passions as personally, ardently and persuasively as possible, and to give as little credence as possible to the alleged preferences of a politically-motivated, comfort-seeking, sentimentally-inclined, wowed-by-almost-anything-British and recently suspect industry group.

It’s been pointed out time and again that the Academy had a reasonable, fair-minded history in their Best Picture preferences from the mid aughts to ’10 but then last year did an about-face and, in a startling cave-in to British kowtowing and comforting gutty-wut sentiment, gave the Oscar to an admirable-but-far-from-good-enough contender. For the sake of the Academy’s reputation among the aloof and justifiably cynical younger crowd (i.e., the ones that the Academy hopes might be attracted by the hand of Oscar-show producer Brett Ratner) and for the sake of our souls, a capitulation of this sort must never happen again.